


Everyone is Wrong Here

by nice_girls_play



Category: Red Dwarf
Genre: BDSM, Dreams, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-02-12
Updated: 2011-02-12
Packaged: 2017-10-15 14:26:14
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,740
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/161717
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nice_girls_play/pseuds/nice_girls_play
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Post-Demons and Angels. Lister thinks (and dreams) about what he saw on the Lows' ship.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Everyone is Wrong Here

**Author's Note:**

> From the red_xmas prompt: _I've always loved the idea of exploring how Lister reacted to Rimmer after the Doppleganger episode; as in, how does he deal with knowing that Rimmer has a really dark, sexually sadistic side?_

\--

That, as they say, was smegging that.

It was amazing -- after abandoning the Dwarf, being blown up, divided into three, fighting their way through two only vaguely familiar ships, suffering a variety of multisensory tortures and being hastily reconstituted in the space of an hour -- how quickly things could return to the status quo.

Holly expressed a brief intellectual frustration at not getting to face and interact with her own counterparts before returning to her sixth round of charades with the skutters.

Kryten went back to tinkering with the matter paddle, insisting that in spite of the "slight kerfuffle" they'd experienced, it might still have some value in relation to replenishing the food supply.

Lister, being the last human alive but ultimately *only* human, could do little more than carry on flying the 'Bug, talking to Holly about new areas of space and speculating on ways they could all best use their time with ever-spiralling supply rations.

If anyone brought up the disturbing nature of what they'd seen about themselves, it was Cat complaining about the "outdated facial hair" and criminal fashion sense of his higher self. With perhaps Rimmer providing a half-hearted echo about his dancing. He wondered if he could have seen their higher selves conversation in the corridor, right before he'd stabbed one in the heart and crushed the other's light bee, which he would have considered the bigger embarrassment.

They seemed far more shocked by the amount of good potential in each of them than the bad. But then, they hadn't had nearly the amount of time to become acquainted with their low selves as he had. His stomach turned a little at that, probably still offended by the encounter with the tarantula.

Yes, it was truly amazing, Lister thought, how quickly everything had returned to normal.

\--

The dream almost couldn't be called a dream. It was too brief, lacking in any kind of concrete visual detail or sense of the environment around him.

All there was was the loud *crack* and a sharp sting across his head, followed by every hair follicle on his body tingling.

\--

It was not a surprise that they lied. All of them. Confronted with the absolute worst aspects of himself and those around him incarnate, Lister was not shocked that they were all liars.

It was the things they chose to lie about that confused him. He hadn't held the magnifying glass to his friend Marshall's neck when they were kids. But he had held one of his arms while Jason MacGough did it. He'd curiously pulled the wings off of a pair of bees and then cried as his father set fire to their hive. He didn't want his friends to fail. The people he'd been closest to in life -- Chen, Selby, Petersen -- just had the same priorities he did, which was to have a few drinks, pull a few and have as a good time as possible with as few responsiblities as possible. It was hard to fail at that (and hard to rise above it, too, but it wasn't as if they'd aspired for different). He was not cruel. At least never intentionally.

'I'm going to lash you within an inch of your life. And then I'm going to have you.'

Rationally, he'd known that was a lie. Low Rimmer, like the Rimmer who composited him, was non-corporeal and therefore could not *have* him in the manner he implied.

Still, it hadn't stopped his stomach from clenching as he said it.

Even more hard to absorb was the things they'd got right, with that same smug, atemporal insight their higher selves seemed to have: he did love horror movies. He did enjoy perusing the AR games for a quick, no-strings shag with a computer sprite.

He did think terrible things.

\--

Another night. The crack of the whip, the pain in his head and the prickles down the rest of his body. He could feel a warmth in his belly spreading downwards. The warm, panting breath at his ear did little to curb it. Nor did the sensual hum underneath it.

'Wake up! You don't want to miss the pain!'

No, he thought, blinking at the revelation. No, he didn't.

\--

The fishnets weren't a suprise either. Not from the man whose first instinct upon meeting dimensional duplicates of himself was to imagine them in taffeta ballgowns. If Rimmer's sexuality was complicated, the man was either too thick or too inexperienced to know it.

Still, he'd never gotten the impression of him as being particularly dominant. Or, at least, not being a very good dominant. If he went to the munitions cabinet and retrieved the holo-whip that now haunted his dreams, he doubted Rimmer would know what to do with it. He could see him picking it up from the table, allowing the handle to sit loosely in his palm, fingers cradling it, inanimate as a dead badger.

From the day they'd met, Rimmer seemed like a born toady: cozying up to Todhunter and Captain Hollister, always finding extra, useless endeavors to attempt to impress them. Chief eunuch in-smegging-deed. Built to follow rather than to lead.

Yet he *wanted* to lead. The desire was there. Lister had spent enough hours specifically trying to undermine that instinct and back it came each time, like the termites that had eaten his gran's first house back in Liverpool.

"Why do you never do as I tell you?" he'd asked him once. There were many reasons, not least of which because it was so fun to watch Rimmer lose control and scramble to get it back.

He fetishized the Space Corps and military authority in a way that baffled Lister. He read and treated his back issues of "Fascist Dictator Monthly" with as much loving care as he treated his "Big Bosoms from Europa." His books on Patton and Alexander the Great, the toy soldiers he'd burned to keep Lister warm on the ice moon, the mess he had made of the droids on Waxworld...

And yet none of it seemed to imply he wanted to cause pain, or would enjoy inflicting pain. Pain on Lister, especially.

Of course, there was the time he'd tied his locks to the bed. And the time he'd fallen and been put into traction, when Rimmer had laughed to the point of nausea...

The back of his neck pulsed painfully.

\--

The next time he dreamed, he could finally see.

He was strapped to the bed in the derelict Red Dwarf. He could feel the straps pulled tight across his chest and legs, see the black and grey scorched ceiling; the frayed and sparking wires connected to the blackened consols. He blinked as his eyes watered.

"You look so pretty there."

The voice seemed to come from all around him. His eyes remained on the ceiling.

"Alone. Frightened," the familiar voice paused, savoring the words with an almost inaudible hum. "Vulnerable. It makes me want to do things."

'So why don't you?' Lister wanted to say. Knowing the answer lay in the unusual restraint of his unconscious mind.

"Are you going to do what I tell you?"

His lips felt thick as he tried to form words.

"Yes."

\--

"Another restful night, Listy?"

He glanced up from the bunk, staring at the hologram hunched over the table. A pair of skutters were painting and filling in a new timetable. This many years later, it still seemed to gaul the second technichian that the service droids' penmanship couldn't quite match his once perfect copperplate hand.

"No, I said to the left. To the left! It's an uppercase 'L', not a stick person!"

Lister sighed, rubbing his eyes.

"What are you on about, Rimmer?"

"All that tossing and turning you've been doing, moaning in your sleep. Your worse than my aunt Jane's asthmatic spaniel. You really ought to be more considerate of those you live with."

He pulled the covers up and over his waist.

"You don't need sleep."

"How kind of you to remind me." The skutters dropped their brushes as Rimmer abruptly stalked out of the room, not looking back at Lister's stare.

Rimmer in a snit was usually easy to decipher -- if only because half the time, Lister ignored him. Both were getting harder and harder to do.

He wondered how much Rimmer had seen of their lower selves before they'd dragged his body off to the drive room. He'd been far enough away that he hadn't responded to Lister's calls. Unless, of course, he'd just been too chicken to respond.

Had he gotten a look at the worst of himself? Maybe if Lister had been the one to find him, he would have a better idea. As it was, Rimmer's sudden temper was incomprehensible. And, along with the pain in his neck and the erection that was tenting his sheets, it made going to back to sleep look a lot better than getting up...

\--

Lister couldn't move his head because it too was strapped to the table.

He stared ahead as the taller man with the crooked 'H' leaned over him. The hair retained its curl and the chain between his piercings was gone, but he thought he saw the fur and an ostrich plume framed somewhere behind his head. The whip hummed loudly in Rimmer's hand as he ran the handle across his chest, drawing up the hem of his t-shirt and circling one of his nipples. His nerve endings crackled, his back arched, reaching out for the touch that seemed to hover just above his skin.

For all the similarities between the Rimmer who'd wanted to torture him, the Rimmer he saw everyday and the one he was facing now, one difference stood out in the dream: this Rimmer could touch him. Which he did, retracing the path the whip had taken with blunt-edged fingernails. Lister winced as he tugged a few of his chest hairs and scratched hard enough to draw blood.

"I want to hurt you."

"Yes." He no longer questioned why.

"Are you going to be a good boy for me?"

"Yes."

'Thy love cleanses and refreshes me...'

'Show him.'

He leaned in, crashing their lips together.

\--

Below him, Rimmer lay on his back, arms folded, staring at the bottom of the bunk and listening to the sounds his bunkmate made as he thrashed and ground against the mattress.

He was as far away from sleep as an electronic entity could get.

**Author's Note:**

> The [sequel](http://community.livejournal.com/reddwarfslash/331667.html) to this story by diminuna can be found on LiveJournal. It is fantastic and I hope everyone who enjoyed this story reads it.


End file.
